Stepbrother Needs (His Twisted Game, Book Three) Read Free Page A

dried off and dressed in one of the
pajama sets that Kalia had brought for me.   It was a soft pink strappy tank top and a pair of matching shorts.   It felt like an extravagant waste of
money – the pieces were well made and soft against my skin.   They were obviously expensive.   I’d never spent money on pajamas
before.   Why would I when I could just
wear a long t-shirt and call it a day?  
    I crawled into bed and turned off the
light, but I couldn’t sleep.   My
mind was racing, thoughts of Jeffrey and Cole and Gordon and the mysterious man
who’d shown up here tonight swirling through my head.   Who was that man?   And why wouldn’t Cole tell me about him?
    Obviously I knew Cole had a life here, in
New York, filled with powerful people and important events and meetings and
things I knew nothing about.   But
why was he being so secretive?   Why
was a man trying to gain access to his apartment?  
    Cole’s
not a good guy, Avery.   No matter what
you think.
    That’s what Jeffrey had said.   But Jeffrey wasn’t a good guy himself,
so how was I supposed to believe anything he said?   I pulled the expensive sheets tighter around my body, trying
to find a way to get comfortable.
    I was no stranger to insomnia.   Starting when I was about thirteen, I’d
had a hard time sleeping.   To sleep
was to give up control, to let yourself be vulnerable,
with no protection or security. To sleep meant to let your guard down, and if
there was one thing I’d learned, it was to never let your guard down, even for
a second.   Because the moment you
did, there was always someone there, ready to strike.  
    And I was nobody’s prey.
    My wrist was starting to throb, and I grabbed
my brace from the bathroom and tried to get it on.   But it was too hard to do by myself.   Every time I’d try to fasten it
together, one side would fall off, and my wrist hurt too much to be able to
hold the sides tight enough.
    I opened the medicine cabinet over the
sink and looked for ibuprofen, but there was none.   In fact, the shelves were empty.   I stood there for a moment, staring at the emptiness, so
different from the medicine cabinet at home, which was always filled with a
mess of pill bottles and prescriptions, so many of them that they needed to be
stacked on top of one another.
    I remembered there was a guest bathroom
just off the hallway, so I headed out into the apartment in search of pain
relief.
    The sound of the TV came, muted and soft,
from the living room.  
    Cole must have been watching something.
    The guest bathroom door was open, but I
hesitated, not feeling completely okay about going inside and rummaging through
Cole’s stuff.   It was one thing to
do it in the bathroom off my room – he’d given me that space.
    I thought about going back to bed, but
the ache in my wrist was starting to intensify, and I knew enough about pain to
know that if you didn’t get on top of it, it could eventually become
unmanageable.
    So I took a deep breath and headed for
the living room.
    Cole was sitting on the couch in just a
pair of sweatpants and no shirt, the flat screen TV over the fireplace tuned to SportsCenter .   His dark hair flopped over his forehead, his
eyes bright and focused on the highlights of some football game.
    My heart squeezed in my chest.
    He looked so different than he had just a
few hours ago, all dressed up in his expensive suit, ordering me around some
fancy party that people expected him to be at.   Now he was just Cole, lounging around the house watching SportsCenter , the way he used to do all the time when we
were growing up.
    He’d come home from whatever party or
girl’s house he’d been at, grab a bag of chips or a sandwich and settle onto
our couch and flip on ESPN.   I’d
grab whatever book I was in the middle of and sit down next to him, reading my
book while he watched sports highlights.
    We’d sit there for hours, him watching TV , me lost in my book .   We didn’t talk, except